Race and ‘The Scientist’

What passes as science journalism is often unscientific propaganda.

by Thomas Jackson

It would be tempting to think that science writing, with its emphasis on data and reproducible results, is relatively free from the woolly thinking about race so common elsewhere. It is true that there are still a few objective publications that accept papers from people like Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen, whose findings do not conform to racial orthodoxy. They are exceptions. The most influential science publications, such as Science and Nature are extremely cautious about violating current intellectual fashion, and “popular” publications like Natural History and Scientific American are firmly in the hands of dogmatic egalitarians (see article, All the Data Fit to Print ).

Not surprisingly, the mid-level trade journals read by science workers follow the fashion. The Scientist, for example, is a well-regarded trade publication that bills itself as “the newspaper for the life sciences professional.” It appears twice a month, and runs announcements of research and teaching positions as well as ads for “pre-owned lab equipment,” “high quality antibodies and proteins,” “hazardous gas detection instruments,” and other specialist gear.

One of its issues for Black History Month (formerly known as February) was devoted almost entirely to non-whites, with the four front-page articles covering the following subjects: why blacks are unwilling to serve as research subjects, how black churches can help recruit black research subjects, the dearth of non-whites in the biotech industry, and the means by which non-whites “demonstrate that success in science can come despite barriers.”

The first two of these articles deal with a real problem. In response to wide-spread claims that science “ignores” minorities, the National Institutes of Health and other major grant-making bodies now require that biological research include large numbers of non-white subjects. This is not easy, because so many blacks refuse to take part.

As the first article points out, anyone who tries to recruit black subjects runs into a wall of suspicion, and nearly everyone The Scientist interviewed seems to think this is because science is so “white.” America needs more non-white scientists, if only to encourage blacks to act as research subjects.

However, the most frequently offered explanation for black mistrust is the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. This was a nearly 40-year study, stopped only in 1972, in which U.S. government scientists charted the progress of syphilis in 400 Alabama black men. The men were deliberately left untreated so doctors could study the full course of the disease.

Although this is the only recorded instance of this kind of government malfeasance, it stands as the definitive symbol of white medical research for many blacks and even a few whites. As Arthur Caplan, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics explains — without elaboration — “there’s certainly been many, many areas where minorities have been exploited, mistreated, abused, and used by the research community.”

As The Scientist reports, the other thing blacks frequently say is that since AIDS was probably invented by the U.S. government to exterminate them, medical research cannot be trusted. Various people interviewed in the article have a breezy, ready-made explanation for this mortifyingly implausible point of view: Blacks do not have “equal access” to medicine. As James Bowman, a black professor of medicine at the University of Chicago explains, “As long as we have an inequitable health care system, minorities must be suspicious.” “If they’re not, they’re foolish,” he adds sympathetically.

Kathleen Boozang, a Seton Hall University professor of unspecified race, draws slightly different conclusions from “unequal access”: “If you’re asked to be a subject of research, but then aren’t going to reap the benefits, why should you participate? It ultimately goes back to the structure of the health care system and the lack of access to it.” Thus we arrive at the doubtful but reportedly widely-held view that non-whites don’t like to be research subjects because there is not enough free medicine for poor people. If they thought there was something in it for them they might take part.

According to one black woman who is a genetics counselor, blacks are afraid of science in general because of books like The Bell Curve. “[It says] we’re inferior. You have scientists or even educators saying this,” thus tainting the entire scientific enterprise.

Some of these explanations for low black participation may have a grain of truth, but the main reason — never touched on by The Scientist — is probably the nature of blacks themselves. Whites do not ordinarily agree to be part of a medical study only because they think the research will benefit them or their families. They care about the public good and take a long-term view of how to contribute to it.

These are not traits particularly characteristic of blacks. High crime rates are the classic sign of a short-term view and contempt for society at large. But even among non-criminal populations, when people are matched by income blacks give much less to charity than whites do. Likewise, black neighborhoods are notorious for ignoring municipal recycling plans, and only with the greatest difficulty can blacks be made to participate in blood drives.

Blacks are much less likely to make their organs available for transplant, despite government campaigns to explain to them that blacks often can accept organs only from other blacks. At the same time, one of the most consistent racial differences in polling data is the extent to which blacks believe that government can solve all problems (a view that coexists with the fear that AIDS is an extermination tool). Society is there to help them and not the other way around. This is not the view of people who volunteer their time in the name of medical progress.

Finally, anti-scientific superstitions are likely to be more common among blacks than whites. The pages of virtually any black newspaper are filled with advertisements for psychics, faith healers, numerology books, good-luck charms and other such mumbo jumbo. People who patronize faith healers may not have much interest in medical research.

But given that — for whatever reason — blacks are such reluctant research subjects, scientists are looking for them everywhere. The latest hope seems to be to persuade black churches to help find subjects, but The Scientist reports that this is by no means the happy ending. To the chagrin of some scientists, many black preachers expect to be paid if they are to round up subjects. One puts it somewhat delicately but unmistakably: “If you want to change a church’s agenda to fit something on your own agenda, you need to invest in the infrastructure of the church.”

Even if the research is on diseases like prostate cancer or hypertension, to which blacks are particularly prone, churchgoers are no more willing than anyone else to play the white man’s game. As one black breast cancer activist explains, “[the research institutions] usually send a very well-meaning white woman or white man into the community to pitch the idea. The congregation is very polite, but the people have no intention of complying.” If whites do not have the sense to send black recruiters they are advised, at the very least, to spend a lot of time attending church services and community events so as to “build a comfort level.”

Overcoming Barriers

The article about how non-whites manage to overcome “barriers” and become successes in science rather realistically points out that the biggest barrier is usually poor schooling rather than outright “racism.” A different but telling complaint comes from Kenneth Olden, the first black to run one of the National Institutes of Health. He says blacks in general show little interest in science or scientists, and “the community” seems not to care about his glowing record at Harvard and the National Cancer Institute. “Does it bother me?” he asks. “It does a lot.” Indifference began at home; Dr. Olden’s father could never understand why he wanted to spend so much time studying science.

The successful non-whites interviewed for this article do not appear to dwell on “racism” but The Scientist warns that “even in the academic world prejudice sneaks out.” One black academic complained that when he was hired for his first job, the chairman of the department actually told him it was because they needed a minority. Also, a Choctow Indian woman who says her “native background” is “a profound influence on my holistic approach to cancer patients” is nevertheless insulted that people have asked her why she doesn’t wear moccasins or braids.

Today’s success stories complain about how hard it was not have role models but also complain about how much work it is for them to be role models. “Fighting stereotypes,” is also said to be exhausting business.

The article about the dearth of blacks in the biotech business extols the efforts of companies that are trying to change things. Amgen Inc., for example, has given $1.5 million to Spellman, the black women’s college, to set up a center for molecular biology. It grants scholarships to Spellman students and offers summer internships. The Scientist is silent about how many black lady researchers Amgen has managed to nurture.

David Jensen, who is a recruiter for the biotech industry, is perplexed to note that employers who already have minorities don’t want to give them up: “I think there are more minorities in academia. I don’t know why, but when academia lands some sharp students of minority descent they glom onto them and really foster their interest in the academic research area . . .”

The Scientist managed to find some small companies that admit they make no special effort to hire non-whites. “We’re looking for the very best scientists for the job without regard to their ethnic status,” says a CEO who manages 24 employees. However, the director of a scientific head-hunting firm says that affirmative action inevitably comes with size: “They’ll have developed to 80 employees and they’ll realize “Hey, we don’t have a very diverse work force here,’ and they’ll go out and try to correct that.”

One of the big stories in the issue is about “diversity training,” which is pitched for two main reasons, one moral the other economic. Bernard Scales, the black man in charge of “diversity” for Dupont, says “it’s the right thing to do, in terms of addressing equity, fairness . . . and equal opportunity for all of our employees. And right behind that is that it’s critical to our business success.”

Maurizio Velasquez, founder of Diversity Training Group, agrees: “The more diverse a company is, the more competitive it will be in a diverse society.”

Robert Hayles, a black man who runs his own diversity consulting business, says the same thing: “[W]hen there is diversity of style, of function, of age, of race, of language or of culture in a group contrasted to a group that is more homogeneous — given equal management and goals in both groups — the diverse groups quantitatively and qualitatively outperform the homogeneous groups.” The Scientist did not seem to think it necessary to cite Mr. Hayles sources.

The biotech company Genentech has been pushing diversity with great enthusiasm. For example, it has an association of black employees who put on programs to edify non-blacks. It has a Hispanic association and a Filipino association. The co-chairman of the company’s homosexual association says that such groups are “mushrooming” because of Genentech’s promotion of diversity. This is supposed to be great for business.

The same issue of The Scientist has two long editorials about racial matters. One is a rambling, largely incoherent piece by a black cancer specialist at the University of Texas. Two of its less opaque sentences are: “When the staff of a hospital deals with the health problems of minority patients without the training, insight, or sensitivity needed to approach these individuals, efforts are doomed to failure. You might not see this as racism but I do.”

In another editorial, Jordan Cohen makes two points: “Finding solutions to the most recalcitrant health problems, even being able to conceptualize what the problems are, will require a research work force that is much more diverse racially, ethnically, and by gender than we now have.”

How to get that precious diversity? “[T]here is simply no way admissions committees for M.D. and Ph.D. programs can select an adequately diverse class of students today without taking race and ethnicity — explicitly or implicitly — into account.” In other words, to get the “diversity” the country needs, standards for doctors and scientists must be selectively lowered, and better-qualified whites kept out. Ominously, Mr. Cohen is president of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

The last article in this special issue is a somewhat sheepish account of the “science” going on in black universities. After a bit of hemming and hawing, the article concedes that “research output is less important than is research for its educational value.” It goes on to conclude that black colleges “could fill an important niche in translational research — that is, research that bridges discoveries from the laboratory to the community.”

Too white.

This special issue is probably typical of the kind of thing scientists read and think they have to believe. Even in the laboratory and operating room, there are strong pressures to have the right line up of non-whites rather than the most capable people. The Scientist’s cheerful acceptance of this view is almost amusing in light of a claim the paper makes in the masthead of every issue:

The Scientist serves its readership in many ways, but one of its most valued aspects is its commitment to open discussion of controversial topics. While readers praise us for this commitment, they should also recognize that all articles . . . reflect the views of their authors and not the official views of the publication . . .

Now, perhaps, we understand. The editors actually know all about race and IQ, but promote affirmative action only to be “controversial.”

SIDEBAR

Minority Money

The plan to increase the number of non-white in the sciences is getting a big push from the government. In President Clinton’s proposed FY 1998 budget for the National Institutes of Health, the second largest expense item is minority programs. Out of a total of $13.1 billion, $1.38 billion or more than ten percent will be spent on the quixotic quest of turning blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians into scientists. One typical NIH program offers five-year grants to universities in the range of $500,000 to $3 million. They are to “support minority scientists” by paying for salaries, lab space, technical support, and travel.

What is the only NIH budget item larger than “minority programs”? AIDS research, which gets $1.5 billion. Breast cancer research, for example, is well behind at $396 million.

Twaddle for the Masses

The New York Academy of Sciences publishes a popularly-oriented magazine called The Sciences. For March/April it, too, published a “special issue on race,” which promotes the usual bumf. The main article recirculated the view that “most anthropologists today acknowledge that biological races are a myth.” The author does not even recognize the legitimacy of identifying crime suspects by race or of studying differences in susceptibility to disease. He concludes:

[T]hose who continue to see race in biology but mean no harm by it are nothing more than ‘kind racists.’ By continuing to legitimize race, they inadvertently aid the ‘mean racists,’ who wish to do harm. Far too many scientists, unfortunately, still belong to both categories.

Another article wonders rather stupidly whether black classicist Frank Snowden is a traitor to his race because he does not believe the ancient Egyptians were black. Since the article raises the question, it is compelled to answer it: “If one had to cluster their skulls with those of any other population, it would be with Neolithic Europeans.” But wouldn’t such classifications be the work of those misguided “kind racists?”

One article actually wonders why white and north-Asian societies have been more successful than others. The reason this odious question must be raised is that “without some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all.”

Author Jared Diamond does not quite supply the “convincing, detailed” explanation he says we need. Eurasia’s success, he writes, is due to four accidents, none of which has to do with intelligence or genetics:

There were more and better candidates for plant and animal domestication in Eurasia.

Travel was easier so progress could spread more quickly.

The area was not “isolated” from new ideas, as were Africa and the Americas.

Eurasia was the biggest continent, with the most people, so it naturally had the most inventors. Q.E.D.

The only jarring note in an otherwise smug view of race is a review of a book called Race in the Making. Author Lawrence Hirschfeld is reported to have concluded that “children have a pervasive tendency to think racially — that is, to see race as natural and important in predicting what people will be like and how they will behave.” What’s more, Mr. Hirschfeld seems to think this is an inherent part of a child’s identity: “Substantial aspects of children’s racial cognitions do not appear to be derived from adult culture.”

The author of the review accepts that people may well be born with an inherent people-sorting mechanism but argues — hilariously — that it may be only in America that the mechanism latches on to race. Perhaps in other, happier lands it focuses on “sexual preference, or gender, or occupation” and ignores race. After all, race “has no basis in the real biology of the species,” and it would be stupid of Nature to have endowed people with a detection mechanism for something that isn’t even there.

New Lies For Old

The case of the caucasoid skeletons.

by Samuel Francis

Whenever you get into a debate, you can almost always tell your opponent is hiding something when he starts piling up new arguments for his position in place of the old arguments you’ve already refuted. In the debate over IQ and race, this happens frequently.

First the argument was that IQ tests were culturally biased. But new IQ tests showed that the more you control for cultural bias, the larger the IQ differences between the races. Then it was claimed that intelligence really can’t be tested. But performance on IQ tests matched performance in school, academic tests, and professional success. Then they said “intelligence” doesn’t really exist anyway. But intelligence is a concept that human societies have always recognized and would find it hard to abandon. Finally, the most recent argument has been that “race” doesn’t really exist, that it’s only a “social construct.” Now even that defense of egalitarianism, an increasingly common one, is starting to shrivel.

But the shriveling isn’t happening without a good deal of last-ditch egalitarian resistance. On April 17th, The Washington Post reported in a front page story that archaeologists have now found remains of quite a few prehistoric pilgrims to North America whose skeletons are — well — “Caucasoid” (see AR, January and April, for reports on “Kennewick Man”). This is a problem for two reasons.

In the first place, as everyone who has seen the Eisner version of “Pocahontas” knows, Caucasians were invaders who stole the country from the “First Americans” — namely the North American Indians, who, as Post staff writer Boyce Rensberger put it, “all resembled today’s Asiatic peoples, popularly called Mongoloids.” (Popularly? When was the last time you heard someone in a bar referring to Asians or Orientals as Mongoloids?) If the “First Americans” or “Native Americans” were really Caucasian, then maybe Mr. Eisner will have to remake his movie and a lot of textbooks will have to be rewritten. But more of that problem anon.

First, how could scientists tell the skeletons were Caucasian rather than Mongoloid? Identification, says the Post story, was “based on a scientific technique called craniofacial morphometric analysis. It involves detailed study of the shape of the skull and face, using a sophisticated method called multivariate analysis. In some cases, more than 60 different dimensions of a skull are measured and compared with comparable dimensions considered typical of specific racial groups.”

But if race doesn’t really exist, if it’s just a “social construct,” how can you identify the race of a skeleton? Mr. Rensberger (or his editors at Egalitarian HQ) tried to handle the difficulty manfully and sensitively. Here is their solution:

Most anthropologists agree that races, as most people use the term, are socially defined groupings with no scientific definition. No physical traits are exclusively the property of one race or another. Still, anthropologists agree that certain combinations of measurements, chiefly of the face and skull, can be used to determine whether individuals belong to one population [!] or another. This is true primarily for groups [!!] that have been separated geographically for thousands of years.

Now in the first place, the above paragraph has nothing to do with the news content of the story. It is inserted purely for ideological instruction, to let readers know that the Post has not signed up with theBell Curve boys who believe that race might really exist after all. Back in the good old days of the Soviet Union, Pravda probably had lots of paragraphs just like it. But in the second place, whether Mr. Rensberger or his editors realize it or not, they have just told their readers that race really does exist. It exists, not as a social construct or as “socially defined,” but as an objective fact of nature.

Favorite football team: unknown.

Class, for example, is a “social construct.” You cannot tell someone’s class by examining his skeleton. Nor can you tell his religion, nationality, regional origin, marital status, or favorite football team. But you can identify his race (and sex) because race is not “socially defined” but, like sex, is defined by nature.

As J. Philippe Rushton notes in his Race, Evolution, and Behavior, “The view that race is only a social construct is contradicted by biological evidence. Along with blood protein and DNA data . . . forensic scientists are able to classify skulls by race.” (p. 235) As behavioral geneticist Glayde Whitney wrote in AR (March 1997),

. . . it has already become obvious that there are substantial genetic differences between the races. It is trivial to identify unerringly the race of any individual, including mixes of various races. This fact should forever dispel the myth of racial equivalence. Fashionable nonsense to the effect that race is a social rather than a biological phenomenon is clearly and demonstrably false

Race, in other words, is a genetic construct, a natural construct, and social definitions have nothing to do with it. The discovery of the Caucasoid skeletons in North America lets a lot of skeletons out of the scientific and journalistic closets, and some “scientists” whose job it is to guard those closets don’t much like it. As the Post was careful to point out later in the same story, “Some anthropologists reject the Caucasoid label for the prehistoric skeletons.”

Daniel Grayson of the University of Washington, for one, says that using the word “Caucasoid” “raises ’a red flag, suggesting that whites were here earlier and Indians were here later.’” Professor Grayson adds that using “the word,” as the Post refers to the term Caucasoid, “implies that the ancient peoples who reached the New World were like today’s Europeans or American whites.”

Well, this is obviously getting out of hand, and it brings us to the second problem raised by these ancient skeletons. Somebody might say that the Europeans who arrived after 1492 weren’t such aggressive invaders after all, that they might even have had some right to come here since their ancestors were here at least as early as “First Americans.”

Hence, the Post is quick to point out that “some other anthropologists” (who remain unnamed) note, “the “apparently Caucasoid’ skeletons may represent a physical type that was not ancestral to today’s Europeans . . . In other words, the scientists say it is possible that it is only a coincidence that the ancient skeletons have features that resemble those of Europeans.” Well, that’s much better, because, you see, even though race doesn’t really exist and is only a social construct, the prehistoric Caucasoids who came here were not of the same race as the later Caucasoid invaders.

Obviously, the white people who came to this continent 9,000 years ago didn’t establish any political or cultural claim to the continent for modern whites, regardless of whether they were “ancestral” to them. Neither does the presence of Mongoloid ancestors of the modern Indians establish any political or cultural claim for their modern descendants. The claims of each group are based on what their more immediate ancestors contributed to the making of what is today American civilization and the American nation, and it ought to be fairly obvious that the modern European races (excuse me, I meant “population groups”) had a bit more to do with that than the Kwakiutls and the Ojibwas.

But another obvious point is that modern racial egalitarians can’t bear to look at the evidence from comparative anatomy and molecular genetics that now prances before their eyes, and they have to resort to the most grotesque ideological and linguistic contortions to preserve the egalitarian myth that race doesn’t exist. Newspapers like the Post and some scientists like (apparently) Professor Grayson are always happy to enlist themselves in the preservation of such myths, to the point that both science and journalism are imperiled. If the trend continues we might as well give the country back to the Caucasoids.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist and the editor of The Samuel Francis Letter.

SIDEBAR

Revolution From the Middle

Samuel Francis’ latest volume of political commentary, Revolution From the Middle has just been published. It is a collection of his columns from Chronicles magazine, and spans the period 1989 to 1996. The following passage strikes what is perhaps the book’s central theme.

“The political conflict of the future is likely to be not on the horizontal plane between left and right but along a vertical axis: between a Middle American substratum, wedded to the integrity of a distinct national and cultural identity, on the one hand, and, on the other, an unassimilated underclass in alliance with an alienated and increasingly cosmopolitan elite.”

All the Data Fit to Print

The scientific world divides publications into two groups: journals and magazines. Journals publish hard research data and aim to expand the frontiers of knowledge. Anything else is a mere magazine.

Probably the most prestigious and influential journals published in English are Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They do not claim that race does not exist or that intelligence is unaffected by genes, but they are extremely cautious about accepting articles that violate current intellectual fashion.

Science is mainly devoted to “big” science — astronomy, nuclear physics and, increasingly, human genetics. In fact, advances in molecular genetics published in Science were a strong impetus for launching the Human Genome Project (see AR, March 1997). Science now covers the project regularly and devotes a yearly special issue to it.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal is strongly committed to affirmative action, and Science has a clear distaste for racial differences. Nevertheless, it deplores zealotry. Even before the term PC was invented, its long-term editor, Daniel Koshland, was publishing editorials denouncing political persecution and self-censorship. More recently, it ran not-entirely-hostile comments on the wrath visited upon Christopher Brand and Glayde Whitney for having suggested that race may have something to do with intelligence and crime rates. It has published letters to the editor from Philippe Rushton and even one from your servant, the editor of AR. It is not inconceivable that it will some day accept a feature article by Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, or Richard Lynn, but that would be a major event.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) is another extremely influential journal. The National Academy of Science (NAS) itself is a government-sponsored body, established in 1863, whose members are elected by the existing members. It glistens with prestige and is supposed to make recommendations to government, perform good works, etc.

Since at least 1934, Science had been publishing abstracts of all papers presented at NAS meetings, thus giving them world-wide exposure. This practice came to a sudden end in 1968, after NAS-member and Nobel-prize-winning inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, began presenting papers on race, IQ, and eugenics. PNAS itself made a similar publishing decision. It used to accept all submissions from members, but changed its policy in 1972 so as to be able to shut out William Shockley.

Perhaps in repentance for this high-handedness, PNAS has since published a number of important papers on the genetic distance between races as well as DNA studies of how long ago the races diverged from each other. It occasionally publishes papers on behavioral genetics and in 1986 even accepted a report by Philippe Rushton on the heritability of altruism.

Nature, published in England, is strongly oriented toward biology. It is of distinguished lineage and at one time regularly published Francis Galton. It has drifted so far from these fine beginnings that in 1992 its editor, John Maddox, wrote a full-page editorial explaining why he would not accept Prof. Rushton’s work on race and brain size. He explained that science of this kind was so contrary to established opinion that it had to meet higher standards than other research. However, the raging letters controversy that followed this editorial was excellent publicity for Prof. Rushton’s findings.

Scientific American is a mere magazine about science and does not publish original research. However, it has a large circulation, is highly regarded, and is the oldest science-related magazine in America. Unfortunately, in the last 15 years or so, it has fallen into the hands of the determined opposition. Stephen Jay Gould, who carries forward the work of Franz Boas, essentially sets the tone for articles about race and human nature. Scientific American’s current leanings were on display during a radio interview with the editor to mark the 150th anniversary of the magazine’s beginning. He noted — with pride — that Vladimir Lenin had read and liked the magazine.

Another influential science magazine with an even larger circulation is Natural History, published by the American Museum of Natural History. The indefatigable Dr. Gould writes a column for every issue, and in perhaps 30 percent of them he takes off after racists, racialism, etc.

Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is in yet another category. It sometimes publishes excellent medical articles and symposia on public health issues, but is known among scientists for its biases. The most obvious is that as the union magazine for doctors it is devoted to making their profession as lucrative as possible. On social science questions it is no less trendy than the New York Times, but can be read to equally good purpose: it reports useful information that undercuts — but somehow never changes — its editorial positions.

Which are the science journals most open to questions of race and genetics? Personality and Individual Differences, edited in England by Hans Eysenck, and Intelligence, edited in the United States by Douglas Detterman, are clear-thinking and widely read. Their articles are often cited in other journals. The Mankind Quarterly, published by Roger Pearson (his latest book will be reviewed in the next issue) has for years been sailing courageously against the wind and has aired a large number of ideas now central to a realistic understanding of race, heredity, and social behavior.

Finally, Transaction Publishers — which has brought out such important books as Prof. Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior, Michael Levin’s Feminism and Freedom, and The IQ Controversy by Mark Synderman and Stanley Rothman — publishes a magazine called Society. Although its field is the social sciences, where the political constraints are even tighter, Transaction does seem to try to follow the data rather than the fashion of the day.

Although the science press is not much less unscientific about race than anyone else, it would be a mistake to blame this on a special and shadowy class of people known as editors. People in the field report that science journalism largely reflects the convictions and fears of scientists themselves. They are no different from anyone else in their preference that someone else risk his career by publishing “racist” or “sexist” findings. Science is a great ally, which continues to establish the factual basis for ancient wisdom that the current era would deny, but its direction and the uses to which it is put change only as society changes.

More Blows to Affirmative Action

Judges are undoing the damage done by judges

The country is in a fearful guddle over affirmative action, with federal judges over-ruling each other, bureaucrats reversing themselves, and sore losers trying to think up new ways to keep on discriminating against whites. We have entered the inevitable chaos of a time when what was once legal — and mandatory — is becoming illegal.

Under our current system of judicial dictatorship judges make — and unmake — policy, and they have been hard at work recently. Perhaps most significant was the April 11th ruling of the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals upholding the California voter initiative banning state-sponsored affirmative action. A black district judge, Thelton Henderson, had ruled earlier that any initiative that forbade discrimination in favor of women and non-whites was discrimination, but the three-judge appeals panel brushed his silly arguments aside. Private companies in California are still free to indulge in racial preferences, but the great, anti-white apparatus may well have suffered a fatal setback.

William Clinton, whose Justice Department had argued against the voter initiative, intends to circumvent the new principle of non-discrimination: “We’ll have to regroup and find new ways to achieve the same objective.”

The California university system announced an end to race — and sex — preferences in admissions last year. Although the change will not take effect until 1998, black and Hispanic applications for 1997 are down 7.7 and 5.8 percent respectively. Whites and Asians, who now expect fairer treatment, have increased applications by 10.4 percent and 10.8 percent. Black applications to California medical schools have dropped by a quarter over the last two years while Hispanic applications have dropped by a third.

California whites are beginning to feel their oats. Several recently sued the Peralta Community College District in Alameda County, claiming that it has been breaking the law since 1995, when it adopted a 33 percent hiring quota for blacks. This year, for example, 75 percent of the management positions at the Laney campus were filled by blacks, as were 40 percent of such positions at the College of Alameda. Three of the district’s four college presidents are black. Blatant discrimination of this kind is unlikely to survive.

There has been excitement in Texas, too. Last year, the federal appeals court forbade any consideration of race in the academic admissions process. In a suit brought in 1992 by Cheryl Hopwood against the law school of the University of Texas, it was found that the school routinely accepted blacks and Hispanics with qualifications that would automatically disqualify a white. Miss Hopwood, who became a certified public accountant after she was turned away from the law school, is now suing the school for $2.8 million in damages. Three other whites who were rejected under the old system are also suing for millions.

Meanwhile, a study published in April’s New York University Law Review predicts that if American law schools abandon racial preferences, they will turn as white as they were in the 1960s. Linda Wightman writes that 26 percent of all black applicants are now accepted, but without affirmative action only 3 percent will be. Hispanic acceptances will drop from 32 percent to nine percent. These places will be taken mainly by whites who are today rejected so that less-qualified non-whites can become lawyers.

Indeed, now that race preferences have been forbidden at the Texas law school, the number of non-whites has plummeted. With 80 percent of the fall, 1997 class admitted, there were only six black students and 18 Mexicans. Last year, there were 65 blacks and 70 Mexicans.

Declines like this are like a red rag to a bull, and in March Texas was thrown into temporary turmoil by a desperate charge from Norma Cantu, Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights. Miss Cantu, a former regional director of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, has made it her job to ensure that uppity whites do not disturb the new Herrenvolk. She wrote a letter to all Texas legislators explaining that the Hopwood ruling applied only to the very narrow circumstances of the law school at that time, and that if affirmative action did not continue at full throttle, the Department of Education would withhold education funding for the state of Texas — all $500 million of it. The Texas Congressional delegation nearly burst into flames, and the U.S. Solicitor General wrote a stiff letter to Miss Cantu explaining that it was not her place to tell Texas to disobey its lord and master, the federal judiciary.

Miss Cantu has since subsided into silence, but the Texas legislature has taken up her cause, trying to think of ways to restore minority admissions without considering race. One ingenious plan, which has already passed the lower house, would automatically admit to state universities the top ten percent of every Texas high school class.

Since high schools are mostly segregated, the plan would essentially admit the top ten percent of each race, without regard to qualifications — a kind of race norming. Non-whites who wanted to go to college would then have good reason to stay out of white high schools.

One trick being considered to get non-whites into law school would be to grant favors to students who got better undergraduate grades than their SAT scores suggested they would. The state would give them the money for a LSAT (Law School Admissions Test) prep course, which can cost as much as $800. The theory is that the SAT is biased against non-whites, but the opposite is true. The SAT overpredicts college performance for blacks and Hispanics, who get worse grades than the SAT suggests they will. No doubt the state will drop this plan as soon as someone explains that it would help whites rather than non-whites.

Texans have also revived the old idea of affirmative action for poor people, in the hope that it will have the same effect as race preferences. It will not. Blacks from the wealthiest families get lower SAT scores than whites from the poorest families, and a big push to get the poor into college is likely to help more Asians than anyone else. Michael Olivas, a law professor at University of Texas, argues that if you want to select on the basis of race nothing can take its place: “In the end, race is the only proxy for race.”

Why the clamor for diversity and racial preferences, anyway? The Association of American Universities took out a large ad in the April 24th New York Times to explain. With the president of Harvard, Neil Rudenstine, leading the pack, the ad denounced “narrow” definitions of merit, and claimed that diversity is a “value that is central to the very concept of education in our institutions.” Central to the very concept? One wonders how white people even learned to read back before diversity.

Interestingly, there is strong evidence that support for racial preferences is mainly for public consumption even at universities. In a little-reported nationwide Roper poll commissioned by the National Association of Scholars, 56 percent of university faculty members opposed race — and sex — preferences in admissions and 60 percent opposed them in faculty hiring. Sanity eventually trickles up to the intellectual class.

Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House of Representatives, is still at the back of the bus. He thinks whites should emphasize that they are trying to solve problems for non-whites; once non-whites are convinced of this then perhaps anti-white discrimination can be eliminated. The push cannot come from Republicans since, as he explains, “all too many conservatives were passive during the segregation fight or candidly on the side of segregation.”

The Supreme Court, where racial preferences are likely to play out their final agony, gave another hint about its leanings when it refused on April 28th to reinstate an affirmative action program that had been invalidated by an appeals court. Since 1984, the city of Flint, Michigan has kept separate promotion lists for black and white police officers, carefully promoting one black to sergeant for every white. Eleven white officers sued, pointing out that if promotions were based on ability rather than race, they would have gotten the jobs. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, and ordered the city to determine to what extent the whites have been harmed. By refusing to intervene, the Supreme Court upheld the Circuit Court.

Official racial discrimination, at least in its most egregious forms, appears to be on the way out and “conservatives” are happy. They shouldn’t be. It just so happens that the sovereign judiciary is now ruling in ways that please them. After all, it was judges who ordered the country into the brambles of affirmative action, and it is judges who are ordering it out. There is no telling where we might be marched off to next, since there is no telling what haruspicine readings of the Constitution are yet to come. As judges write new decisions to countermand old ones do they have any idea how much damage they have done? Hundreds of thousands of whites have had opportunities legally denied them, and non-whites now expect preferential treatment as a birthright. There will be a great deal of yelling and perhaps not a little violence before the curtain finally comes down on legal, anti-white discrimination. This decades-old nightmare is one of the most convincing demonstrations yet of the folly of rule by judges.

O Tempora, O Mores!

AIDS and the Man

Helsinki, Finland is in an uproar over the trial of a 35-year-old black American, Steve Thomas, who went on a sex spree after learning that he has the AIDS virus. Mr. Thomas, who is married to a Finnish woman with whom he had two children, reportedly had sex with over 100 women in the last several years. Dozens of them now have the virus. Mr. Thomas worked as a doorman at bars and nightclubs, where women are said to have found him appealingly exotic. He faces more than 100 counts of attempted murder. In 1990 a Helsinki court sentenced an Ugandan man to 11½ years in prison for deliberately infecting women with AIDS. (N.Y. Rapper Accused in HIV Murder-trial in Finland, New York Daily News, April 18, 1997. Devlin Barrett, HIV+ New York Lover on Trial in Finland, New York Post, April 18, 1997, p. 3.)

A similar case has come to light in East St. Louis, Illinois. Twenty-eight-year-old Darnell McGee learned in 1992 that he had the AIDS virus and, according to friends, was determined to give it to as many women as possible. Like Mr. Thomas, he is said to have seduced over 100 young women of all races, ranging in age from 12 to 22. Over 30 have tested positive and one has given birth to an AIDS-infected baby.

Mr. McGee gave rides to young girls in his Cadillac, told them they were beautiful, bought them hamburgers, and argued — sometimes even cried — for sex. In January, Mr. McGee was murdered in what may have been a revenge killing. The man who dispatched him is still at large. (Kristina Sauerwein, Man’s Deadly Legacy Triggers Frantic Race, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 11, 1997, p. 1. Kristina Sauerwein, For McGee, Hunt Was Thrill, Experts Say, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 27, 1997, p. 1.)

Great Black Hope

Julius Ceasar Watts is a black Republican Congressman from Oklahoma. He was first sent to Washington in 1994 at age 39, and has been the darling of his party ever since. Five days after he was elected to his first term, he was offered the plum job of rebutting one of President Clinton’s Saturday radio addresses. Last summer, he was perhaps the only freshman Congressman to speak to the Republican National Convention, and in February he became the first black given the honor of responding to a State of the Union address.

House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, reports that it was Mr. Watts who, virtually single-handedly, persuaded the Republicans not to start a major fight over affirmative action. Mr. Watts, who is riding high on affirmative action himself, reportedly thinks there were more important conservative battles to be fought.

Mr. Watts preaches family values but became an unwed father at age 18. An uncle reared the child. He also preaches fiscal responsibility, but his real estate management company abstained from property taxes for two years, and was assessed $67,000 in delinquency payments. In 1994, Mr. Watts failed to report $14,320 of his wife’s income to the IRS. Much is forgiven a black “conservative.” (Lynn Sweet, GOP Hail Julius Ceasar Watts, Chicago Sun-Times, March 25, 1997, p. 6.)

Great White Dope

In this, the 50th anniversary year of Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, we have been well reminded that this event was nearly as important as the First Coming. Now, William Clinton would have us believe that he spent his youth throwing Robinson in the faces of racist Arkansas hicks. In an interview with NBC Radio News, Mr. Clinton said that in his youth, Robinson was “the ultimate trump card” in arguments about race: “If you were arguing the integration side of the argument, you could always play the Jackie Robinson card and watch the big, husky redneck shut up,” Mr. Clinton explained. (Sonly Ross, Clinton Addresses Racial Barriers, AP, April 15, 1997.)

Hitting Bottom

In Chicago’s heavily black and Hispanic schools, administrators have stopped supplying rest rooms with toilet paper, soap, or paper towels. If they leave paper in the rest rooms, students clog the plumbing by flushing whole rolls down toilets, and plaster the walls and ceilings with wads of wet paper. Many teachers establish official bathroom breaks, when they dispense just enough paper for a single use. Other schools supply paper in the rest rooms but teachers always accompany students to make sure they do not go wild. There is no soap in these rest rooms because students tear the soap dispensers off the walls. There are no doors to the stalls because students destroy them.

Recently the principal of Revere School on the South Side relaxed its no-paper policy, but only for its older students. They immediately reverted to waste and wildness, so the policy was reinstated. (Janita Poe, In School Bathrooms, Tissue is a Privilege, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 4, 1997, p. 1.)

The Great Have Fallen

The March 4 New York Times carried a 19-inch obituary of Robert Paschal, complete with photograph. Not familiar with Mr. Paschal? He was the black proprietor of Paschal’s, an Atlanta restaurant where Martin Luther King and his friends frequently met to plan the civil rights movement. Thus is fame earned in these strange times. His restaurant was also famous for its, ahem, fried chicken. (Kevin Sack, R.H. Paschal, 88, Restaurateur Who Nurtured Rights Leadership, New York Times, March 4, 1997, p. D23.)

Living the Dream

Joshua White was a 23-year-old child of hippies who grew up in downtown San Francisco. He was a perfect liberal, who became a child care worker for ghetto children, and had a job as a teacher’s aide for learning-disabled pupils at Martin Luther King Middle School. In March, he was shot for no apparent reason by a black man who approached him with a gun, saying “You want to f*** with me?”

Joshua White’s parents were stalwart to the end. Despite their grief, they blamed society, not the unknown killer. The father says, “The violence and despair that is growing among young people just reached right into our home and took our son. The guy who killed my son might have grown up with more respect for other people if he’d had decent schools and programs and playgrounds.” (Leslie Goldberg, “Love Met Hate’ at Murder Scene, San Francisco Examiner, April 12, 1997, p. A1.)

Blows for Our Side

Columnist Don Feder of the Boston Herald has written an Op-Ed piece that could have come straight out of AR. Called “Americans: An Endangered Species,” it concludes:

Due in large part to our open-borders style of national suicide, America’s European population will shrink from 74 percent today to 53 percent in 2050.“What kind of America will your children and grand-children inherit — the multiculturalists’ delusion of Diversity Disney World where a rainbow of smiling faces celebrates their differences, or Rwanda with high-tech machetes?

I’d rather read about voodoo rites than have my next-door neighbors practice them. I’ll willingly forgo more ethnic restaurants for telephone operators who speak my language . . . In 1993, the Sierra Club published a coffee-table book called ‘Endangered Peoples,’ covering such exotics as the Tuareg or North Africa and the Amazon’s Yanomami tribe.

Neglected is a group on the brink of extinction that actually made a contribution to civilization — the Americans. (Don Feder, Boston Herald, March 19, 1997, p. 25.)

This prompted the usual baying for Mr. Feder’s head, but he came out of his corner swinging with another article, called “Despite Liberals Race Does Matter”:

If the alien inundation is as good for America as utopians insist, why then the more the merrier. Why stop at 1 million legal immigrants and another 500,000 illegals each year? Why not immediately open our doors to 20 million or 30 million? Why opt for slow suicide when we could go out with a glorious bang? Why is it that of all peoples on earth only Americans are not entitled to preserve their culture and national identity? . . .

At last we arrive at liberalism’s ugliest secret — liberals hate America (our history and heritage, which they deem irredeemably evil) and long for the day when our nation will sink into a great multicultural ooze.

Bud Light has hit upon a new approach for ads on Spanish television. Lex and Ingo, two obvious “Anglos,” stumble upon a Spanish TV station. “Hey, it’s a Bud Light commercial in Spanish . . . Great music . . . Beautiful women . . .” they say in English, with Spanish subtitles. “Oh man, it must be cool to be Hispanic . . . Why can’t we be Hispanic?” In the next scene they are in a Hispanic bar trying to fit in. The ads are reportedly a great success. (Leon Wynter, Two Anglo Men Are a Hit on Hispanic TV, Wall Street Journal, April 2, 1997.)

Speaking in Tongues

Doctors who practice at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx will have to learn Spanish. They will get free lessons but if they don’t speak the language well enough to communicate with Hispanic patients by June 1999, the city-owned hospital will fire them. One administrator, who would not give his name to the papers, said the plan is unworkable. “We have [foreign] doctors here that barely speak English,” he explained; “what are they going to learn, pidgin Spanish?” (Tracey Miller, Spanish Classes Prescribed for Jacobi Docs, New York Post, April 1, 1997, p. 20.)

The state of New York recently passed a law requiring all publicly-funded candidates for a city-wide office to engage in public debates. Isabelle Pinzler, a “civil rights” functionary for the U.S. Department of Justice has forbidden implementation of the law on the astonishing grounds that it would discriminate against voters who do not speak English and could not understand the debates. (Babel by Decree, New York Post, April 7, 1997, p. 23.)

Odd Couples

On April first, a new law went into effect that makes it easier to deport illegal aliens as well as legal aliens who commit crimes. Marriage to a compliant citizen has always been a quick route to legal residency, and applications to the Miami, Florida marriage license bureau leapt 30 percent as the deadline approached. It also prompted an increase in odd couples. “We’ve had grandmothers walk in here with teenage boys,” says one clerk.

Joe Hyde, a supervisor who conducts civil marriages, says that some couples have to bring an interpreter because they do not speak the same language. “And after you marry them, you tell the groom “You may kiss the bride,’” he says. “They look at each other and say “No thanks.’” (John Lantigua, As Law Changes, Odd Couples Bloom, Miami Herald, Feb. 27, 1997, p. 1A.)

Worse Than We Thought

David Scott is a law student at the University of Miami. He has been an outspoken “conservative” who criticized special treatment for non-white students. One day, an anonymous informer left confidential information from the admissions office in his mail box. It showed such gross racial preferences that, he says, “It seriously makes you question whether these people belong in an advanced-degree program with credentials so low.” He planned to write an article for the student newspaper describing his findings but mentioning no names.

When word got out that Mr. Scott planned such an article, the university’s assistant general counsel, Leyda Benitez-Herrmann, wrote him a letter saying that use of confidential information violated federal law and that he would be punished if he published. Mr. Scott consulted a lawyer and decided to return the documents to the admissions office and publish nothing. He was punished anyway. Non-white students filed an honor code violation complaint against him and he was found guilty of the astounding crime of “interfering with the rights of students to pursue their education free from any real or perceived need to justify their existence.” This was found to be “conduct which casts serious doubt on his fitness to be an attorney,” and he was forced out of every law school organization of which he was a member. Even worse, a letter describing this finding of guilt was put in his permanent file, to be sent to any state bar he attempts to join. This could conceivably keep him from becoming a lawyer.

Mr. Scott did what he was told. He published nothing. He revealed no information about individuals. “Essentially all I did was I made black students feel bad,” he says. And for that he risks being prevented from practicing law. (Mary Geraghty, Students, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 28, 1997, p. A43.)

Start Learning it Now

Many younger Hispanics reportedly use a mix of English and Spanish called Spanglish. There is even a monthly magazine written in Spanglish called Latina, with headlines like “When he says Me Voy [I’m leaving] . . . What Does He Really Mean?” or “Mi Padre’s Infidelity. Are Cuernos [horns] Genetic?”

A constant mix of English and Spanish appears to be more popular among young Hispanic women than men. Nely Galan, a 32-year-old who runs a television and film production company, explains the charms (in English) of her preferred dialect:

I think Spanglish is the future. It’s a phenomenon of being from two cultures. It’s perfectly wonderful. I speak English perfectly. I speak Spanish perfectly, and I choose to speak both simultaneously. How cool is that? (Lizette Alvarez, Spanish-English Hybrid is Spoken With No Apologies, New York Times, March 25, 1997.)

Unfit to Print

On April 24th, the New York Times printed a large ad, signed by 62 college presidents, promoting affirmative action (see previous article, More Blows to Affirmative Action ). Next to it ran a favorable little story about what the leaders of America’s top colleges were doing to maintain diversity. The headline was: “62 Top Colleges Endorse Bias In Admissions.” The next morning, the Times corrected this “editing error,” noting that “‘Bias,’ as a term for affirmative action, was neither impartial nor accurate. It should not have appeared.” (The New York Times Tells the Truth — Oops, The Weekly Standard, May 5, 1997, p. 2.)

Beauty and the Beasts

Brigitte Bardot, the retired French film star, has once more protested against Arab immigration to France. Last year she criticized the Muslim ritual of slitting the throats of sheep for the Ramadan festival. Recently, in light of a five-year Islamic insurgency in Algeria in which a number of French nationals, including monks, have had their throats cut, she said: “They’ve slit the throats of women and children, of our monks, our officials, our tourists and our sheep. They’ll slit our throats one day and we’ll deserve it.” “A Muslim France, with a North African Marianne,” she said, referring to the female symbol of France; “why not, at the point we are at?”

Miss Bardot is to appear in September before the Paris Court of Appeals for last year’s alleged acts of “hatred and racial discrimination.” In January, a lower court acquitted her of the charges, which could bring one year in prison and a fine of $55,000. (Jocelyn Noveck, Bardot Attacks Sheep Ritual, AP, April 17, 1997.)

Doing Her Bidding

Black television personality, Oprah Winfrey, has launched an on-air book club. She is so influential that all five books she has recommended have gone to the top of the best-seller list. When she chooses a new book, her producers alert the publisher in advance so it can print enough copies. She also insists that the publisher make 10,000 copies of the book available to libraries to meet demand. (James Howard, Oprah Plugs Book; Price Rises $5, Rocky Mountain News, April 19, 1997, p. 9D.)

Will They Ever Learn?

White South African liberals have discovered that they get no gratitude from blacks for the fight against apartheid. Helen Suzman, now 79, was one of the original white anti-white activists. “I am surprised at the hostility to liberals these days, even from moderates in the African National Congress,” she says; “I expected it from the right and the far left, who have always called us “Lenin’s useful idiots,’ but I didn’t expect it from them.”

Professor Ithumeleng Mosala explains why blacks despise liberals: “Liberalism is rooted in individualism and that is part of the problem in our society, and it is rooted in possessiveness. Instead of having a proper revolution in this country, we’ve had a liberal revolution and that is why blacks are still where they are today, in the gutter, and why whites are still rich.” Today, it is routine for whites who worked for majority rule to be called “racists” by the people they helped put into power.

Miss Suzman expects the best: “Liberals are a sort of endangered species, but as far as I am concerned we have won — look at the constitution, the bill of rights, they are everything we stood for — so let them rant. I am surprised, but I am not worried.” (Richard Meares, White Liberals Face Hostility in New South Africa, Reuters, March 17, 1997.)

Black Graduation

Affirmative action brings many unprepared blacks to universities. This is reflected in dropout rates. What follow are the percentages of white and black students at various universities who manage to graduate within six years. University of North Carolina — whites 86 percent, blacks 64 percent; Rutgers University — 80, 60; U.C. Berkeley — 84, 58; University of Illinois — 82, 54; Penn State — 80, 51; University of Delaware — 73, 56. (After Late Start, University Works Hard to Graduate Blacks, New York Times, Dec. 1, 1996, p. 16.)

The Diversity Hustle

Towers Perrin is a consulting firm that touts its customized, individually crafted “diversity programs” to help bring companies into the multi-culti future for which we yearn. The American subsidiary of Japan’s Nissan Motor Company recently paid the company $105,000 to produce a diversity proposal but was disappointed to find that everything in it was extremely general and not specific to Nissan. In fact, Towers Perrin has boiler plate diversity analyses that it can slap together for most any client. The Wall Street Journal got hold of eleven Towers Perrin diversity reports and found startling similarities. Most similar, of course, was the final recommendation — employee training to be conducted by Towers Perrin.

Sample blather: “As the nature of [insert company name]’s work changes from a command and control style to a more empowering style where invisible leveraging will be a key to success, leaders must learn how to build, lead, and facilitate both diverse work units and cross-functional teams . . .” (Douglas Blackmon, Consultant’s Advice on Diversity was Anything But Diverse, Wall Street Journal, March 11, 1997, p. 1.)

Why They Get Fat

Nearly half of all black women and one third of white women are overweight. Recent research shows that blacks are more likely to get fat because they have more efficient metabolisms. In the resting state, fat black women consume five percent fewer calories than fat white women. (Jane Brody, Health Watch: Race, Gender and Weight, New York Times, March 26, 1997.)

Importing Incompetence

In March 1996, about one out of every 10 people in the United States or 24.6 million people, were foreign-born. They were worse off than natives in virtually every respect, with a poverty rate of 22.2 percent v. 12. 9 percent, unemployment at 4.9 percent v. 3.8 percent, and with 5.8 percent v. 4.5 percent getting cash assistance form the government. Naturally, the native-born include many non-whites. (Census Bureau News Release, Economic Challenges Wane With Time Among the Nation’s Foreign-Born Population, CB97-55, April 8, 1997.)

New Irish Eyes

Ireland has become a popular destination for “asylum” seekers. In 1992 there were 39 applications; in the first three months of 1997 they poured in at a rate of 2,500 a year. Rumanians — mostly Gypsies — account for a third of the rush, followed by Zairians, Somlians, Algerians, and Nigerians. Many of the Gypsies speak no English. They stand on street corners, some suckling infants, and beg by showing passersby hand-written cards asking for money. (Paul Cullen, Images Aimed at Tourists Attract Refugees as Well, Irish Times, April 19, 1997. Nuala Haughey, Better Here, Say Romany Gypsies, Irish Times, April 19, 1997.)

Sir — I greatly enjoyed Sam Dickson’s inspiring talk from the AR conference, but was especially struck by his reference to the traitor, Ephialtes the Malian. Some traitors, like our recent spate of turncoat intelligence officers, seem to be motivated by pure greed, but in many cases traitors have complex motivations and are not unmitigated evil-doers. Some of our greatest heroes have been described as “traitors” George Washington was a traitor to the crown and Robert E. Lee was a traitor to the Union. Many Americans still think Alger Hiss had a touch of the hero and, of course, all too many people see heroism in the racial treachery of liberalism.

Betrayal usually involves deceiving oneself as much as one’s former friends. In the case of race-traitors, it is the element of self-deceit and the sense of virtue this gives rise to that we must understand and cure if we are to put an end to the mass treachery that threatens us.

Stanley Orr, Pontiac, Mich.

Sir — Thomas Jackson’s May review of Integration or Separation can be read as an explanation for why black societies fail. The author, Roy Brooks, is clearly an intelligent man with an education, but his prescription for black success read like a black magic incantation. The first bit of magic is that if blacks start running schools for black children there will be miraculous improvement. But who already runs the schools in Detroit, Washington, and North Philly — not to mention the ones in Uganda and Liberia? A Santeria sacrifice would be more fun and no less effective than Prof. Brooks’ hocus pocus.

And what’s this about how professional blacks, now languishing as house slaves in the Fortune-500 executive suite, will come high-fiving back to the slums? Any who want to open “wig shops in East St. Louis,” as Mr. Jackson puts it in his review, can do so already.

And then there is the astonishing admission by Prof. Brooks that he, himself, will continue to serve as a house slave in a white university rather than go back to the ‘hood and succor the suffering brothers because “integration has worked well for me and my family!” No deanship at some fly-blown Lumumba-Bumba College of Afro-horrifics for him.

Prof. Brooks is really no different from Mobutu and Bokassa and Idi Amin and all the other stuffed uniforms who have run post-independence Africa into the ground. Progress can be conjured up out of Afro-pieties, the people can stew in their unspeakable but authentically African juices, and the great He-Elephant can have his prostate cancer treated in France.

Stan Westfall, Chapel Hill, N.C.

Sir — As Sam Dickson suggests in “A Certain Trumpet,” the belief in racial equality is essentially a religion and therefore immune to reason. One of the necessary rituals of the religion is to go to extraordinary lengths to portray blacks in a favorable light. I don’t know how many American judges are black women, but if television were an accurate portrayal it would be close to 90 percent.

Name Withheld

Sir — In the May Issue you mention an 11-year-old who led a mob that looted a murder scene before the bodies were cold, even stealing from the corpse. Didn’t Hillary tell us that “it takes a child to raze a town”?

E. Travis Osborne, Athens, Ga.

Sir — In the May O Tempora, “Nature Trumps Nurture,” you write about a boy reared as a girl, who persisted in thinking he was a boy. A case does not make an axiom. Over a lifetime around the night club and casino circuits I have come across several hundred males who have converted to feminine attire, feeling it was more comfortable, thrilling and lucrative to work as women. They are many more “boys” parading around our city streets as women than most people imagine. I’d guess that 90 percent of the ones under the age of adolescence would not be identified as anything but girls.

Rog Veran, Evansville, In.

Sir — I am serving a long sentence in a Pennsylvania prison. The state system, which has 35,000 inmates, recognizes Odinism as a legitimate religion. At my prison we have put together a planning committee and intend to have our first weekly meeting by mid-summer. We will be using out meetings as a vehicle for our views while maintaining a facade of religion. I did something similar in another prison eleven years ago, and it was an effective way to reach other European-Americans.

Up to six people from outside the prison are allowed to attend the meetings. They do not have to be Odinists, just people who support freedom of religion. The prison is in the South west corner of Erie County, Pennsylvania, approximately five miles from the Ohio border. If you have any subscribers in the area who would like to attend our meetings, I invite them to contact us through American Renaissance.